Kazeon last week became the latest vendor to unveil an appliance that searches and classifies files on servers and storage devices and processes them for information life-cycle management or compliance purposes.

The company also announced an agreement with Network Appliance to integrate Kazeon's device into NetApp's storage systems, the first show of interest from a large systems manufacturer in a classification, identification and management appliance.

With its Kazeon Information Server IS1200, Kazeon joins a slew of other start-ups focused on discovering and classifying unstructured information, which represents 80% of the data on the typical network, the Enterprise Strategy Group says.

These companies include an early entrant in this market, Deepfile, which was founded in May 2001 and marketed appliances that de-duplicated redundant data. Deepfile reorganized in 2004 as StoredIQ and now sells appliances tuned for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance and regulatory and evidentiary recovery.

Kazeon also joins Njini, Bridgehead Software, Scentric, Arkivio, Trusted Edge and Index Engines, all start-ups that market either software or software-based appliances that discover and classify files - whether they are Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF.

When the major storage vendors such as EMC, HP and IBM introduced their information life-cycle management plans, they "completely overlooked" the classification and identification of file data, says Brad O'Neill, senior analyst with the Taneja Group

"The large vendors looked at the identification and classification of file data as a feature they would eventually get to," O'Neill says. "They underestimated the degree to which customers would actually be willing to pay to identify their data for compliance, security or information life-cycle management. The big vendors created this pocket of opportunity that has been exploited over the last couple of years by these start-ups."

Mike Dooley, senior director of IT for Zoran, a semiconductor company in Sunnyvale, Calif., bought a Kazeon IS1200 to identify and classify files on two Network Appliance file servers.